


you have cast enough light to make my thought visible again.

by henryclerval



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Not Beta Read, Stream of Consciousness, Unreliable Narrator, warm up piece
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-27
Updated: 2014-04-27
Packaged: 2018-01-20 23:46:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1530206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/henryclerval/pseuds/henryclerval
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky comes to him dirty and gaunt, plain in the day right at his doorstep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you have cast enough light to make my thought visible again.

Bucky comes to him dirty and gaunt, plain in the day right at his doorstep. 

The fire and terror that pushes him has flooded away. Left behind is a waning figure, the loss of muscle mass and weight and the way that Bucky’s shoulder healed can’t be proper. His mechanical arm is the only one that works, despite it being difficult to navigate—damaged here, chipped there, there are entire chunks of it missing that leaves the wiring exposed and raw, begging to be ripped out the rest of the way. 

Bucky comes to him warily, and his fingers hesitate near the thick wood door that separates them—never mind the oceans that already exist, the gaps in memory that make it impossible for him to put a name to a face. 

He is a human being repurposed as a weapon. There is no place for him here, at this door, at this time, when he had been the one tearing all of this to pieces not that long ago—his sense of time is warped, he cannot tell sleeping from cryostasis, daydreaming from being comatose. He can only hold so much information in his head and they are conflicting, telling him that he ought to knock as much as he ought to turn away. 

Look what he has wrought over the years; thrust between sleep and painful wakefulness, fearful of his every step despite knowing how capable he is. 

Bucky comes to him shaking and shivering, hair matted and bags under his eyes. He had been a rumor for so long he does not remember how to be real, how to conceptualize needs and wants and if he stands outside of this door without knocking, without ringing the doorbell, he thinks he will cease to exist. The ache to be there, to be inside the warm home and with the man that _he knows_ that he knows, the one who has a face that seems to fit in his memory even if the rest of him does not. 

The knowledge that he is not worthy of being there, however, rings true and clear over the insistent whirring and buzzing behind his eyes. He has done so much—so much, he flinches and winces when the magnitude of it all digs into his spine in those sharp, serrated pieces of memory—that prevents his entry. 

He cannot claim total innocence. That anger that morphs into fury into rage into unprecedented cruelty is his, the impulse still resides in his very framework. Bucky had not been all of himself but they could not change his core—the violent streak in him that cocktail of nonsensical _kill or be killed_ and a nature that had been there all along. The context is what brought him to his knees, the understanding that he is not alone; he has a home, he has a name, he has a history and a personality and someone knows all of that. 

Someone knows all of that and Bucky had done nearly all that he could to remove him from the face of the Earth. 

Bucky pulls his hand away from the door. How long has he been here? The day escapes him. The year is even less important. The whirring behind his eyes is getting louder with each pound of his heart and the pain in his metal arm is becoming noticeable; how filthy he feels, grimy and covered with grease and dirt from following ghosts of a past life, how his clothes refuse to fit him just so. He feels his hair stick to the back of his neck, the throb of all the scabs and scars that he has picked up and down his organic arm, the dryness in his mouth multiplies as all the moisture in his body runs up to his face. 

He is on needles, feeling the pinpricks as he tries to swallow something—some knot in his throat, some ball of nothing that is stuck on the back of his tongue. 

It must be the sunlight drizzling in through the hallway window that causes his face to heat up. The dust that causes his eyes to sting. He had never been void of emotion but there is a gap in processing that connects this to an emotional response; all he feels is fear. Fear that turns to terror, which has nowhere to go because he does not remember the last time he felt afraid. 

How silly it is, for him to be afraid of a door. 

He knows what is on the other side—an apartment, neatly decorated and recently renovated due to his own misadventures—and he knows what it entails. He knows the infinite amount of ways that this situation can pan out. He knows which way he wishes it will. 

The door echoes with his knock before Bucky realizes what he has done and for a long moment there is no answer. He stands in the hallway, holding onto his metal arm and waits. And waits. He feels himself age; he feels his eyelids become heavy and his scabs caked with dirt throb. He waits until his forgets how to breathe.

Bucky comes to him on the verge of death, responding to an opening door with a flinch and a wheeze that Steve hopes is exaggerated, a stumble forward into Steve—not onto, not toward, the weight of the world is perched on Bucky and there is no more standing to hold it up, Bucky collapses into him with the fear of being torn from him. Bucky shudders and heaves sobs into Steve’s shoulder, choked and coarse, rage-turned-grief thrust upon him faster than he can properly understand. 

Steve, at least, has the good sense not to move when Bucky comes to him like this—a grip on the side of Steve’s shirt that keeps flexing, fidgeting, repeating the process as though he needs to make sure that Steve is still there—and keeps them undisturbed in the doorway, one arm wrapped around while the other is firm and heavy between Bucky’s shoulder blades. 

He has waited almost a century, sacrificing another handful of minutes to be a warmth with which Bucky keeps trying to fuse is insignificant. 

And when Bucky does slow down—his hand finding the one spot near Steve’s ribs where solidity and certainty are a given, where he does not need to keep grappling for material—when his breathing has stopped hiccuping and now he is just an armful of shaking exhaustion, Steve dares to mumble into the top of Bucky’s hair. He says it slow and carefully and with the practiced ease of it being the first time out of a hundred that he has said it to someone other than his mirror. 

_Would you like to come in?_


End file.
